A Lid For Every Pot
by Blue-Inked Frost
Summary: The dark twilight soul of a Bhaalspawn finds its destined mate.  Parody, one shot.  Written for the Attic challenge of would-be villains.


_Summary__:_ The dark twilight soul of a Bhaalspawn finds its destined mate. Parody, one shot.

_A/N__:_ Aerie is mentioned in this fic. She deserves better. Also apologies to Ipsissimus, who wrote another Bhaalspawn of the same species and likewise deserves better. Gormflaith is a genuine Irish name.

Lily M. Green provided an image representing this Bhaalspawn, at gamejag . net/ forum/ ?/ topic/ 18015-a-lid-for-every-pot-quiz-220/ page_view_findpost_p_197773 .

—

She'd never expected to find a soulmate. They laughed at her in Candlekeep, called her cruel names and flung root vegetables at her, dared to discriminate against her longings to paint her room black and decorate with pretty rat skulls dripping with white wax from usage as makeshift candles. And after she had lost glorious wings she imagined to once have been black-feathered and batlike, rising from her back like the sweep of midnight across the sky and carrying her to the depths of darkness in the starless obsidian sky in the black truths of the gloaming hours of twilight...

Certain shallow conformists to a cruelly superficial society liked to heartlessly throw to her face that she had become an avariel without wings as a baby, in her mother's reputedly difficult and bloody process of childbirth, and alleged that she had no reason to miss what she had never known. Indeed she had briefly corresponded in recent years with a whingingly idiotic circus-girl with the claim not only that her own wings had also been removed, but that they had been cut off after a term in slavery after she had spent her youth actually flying. Yet another whining poseur who knew nothing of true tragedies of the soul; and one who dared to mention in correspondence that she considered certain opinions evil. _Evil!_ There was no such thing: only those who were enlightened and those who were not, those who sought the darkness that lay at the heart at all things and those trifling pretenders who acted as if hollow false light and futile cheerfulness were all that was required...

"Y'know, Gormflaith," Imoen said, pronouncing her name as if about to say _Gormless_, "y' really need more fresh air."

Gormflaith ignored her. She was elven, of the People, immortal and pale and refined and able to make people take her seriously through her black hair dye, and Imoen was but a shallow and mortal human who would soon perish...as all perished and became food for worms. Death was inevitable and immutable. Gormflaith painted elegant black runes on her fingernails that said so.

"I don't think Gormy's really evil, Puffguts," Imoen would say to her foster father with a pretence at thoughtfulness, little knowing Gormflaith's cleverness to casually eavesdrop with her head pressed to the boards above and her delicate ears squashed, "just a bit silly about reading the wrong sorts of books and not going out enough. Or doing her proper chores."

"Ha! Then she's too much like ye, then, girl-pick up the broom!"

Life was eternal trial and struggle from people who simply did not understand her. _Well, Gormflaith, if you have no interest in magic then you might wish to try something else. No, Gormflaith, that wailing...no, I don't think bard is exactly the right profession for you. Ye're not nimble-fingered enough for bow or sling, and ye whinge about yer fingernails and the sunshine and yer sweat when it comes to practising. Nah, Gormy, yer just not quick enough to be a sneaky pickpocket like me, that's okay, every good rogue needs a sidekick!_ Such insipidity was easily rejected. Under grave duress from the shallow mere human who called himself her father, she learned a little of the mace; a weapon simple enough to grasp in few enough sessions that her pale white complexion was maintained through limited sojourn upon the training fields. What she longed for was an expression of the dark power she knew would someday lie at her grasp, something to echo the inner jetty space of her deep and ancient soul...

Then her father was dead, and something in her shed tears at the sheer hopelessness of it. Then she met others, such as a necromancer with a stench too much like his spell components; a fellow elf who would have had the right idea about the black futilities of everything if only he did not call her a foolish abomination quite so often; a human bard who strummed acceptably dark songs on death and betrayal most foul; a darkly beautiful drow with a very understandable attitude toward life despite her horrifying bossiness and domination over the group; for Imoen's sake a hulking imbecile man with a rodent and his equally bossy wychlaran. Imoen aided her, pulled her through the trials, though with unpleasant nagging; forced her to smash gibberlings and kobolds on the head with her mace and try to wash the cooking supplies and mend things. Gormflaith had found that there were some reserves of dark power within her, though nowhere near the magnitude that she had dreamed of, something she knew to be inside her that Candlekeep's bland and sterile conformism had stifled...

And then in the great city of Baldur's Gate she had glimpsed _him_ for the first time.

"...And as well when Tiax rules: breeches will not ride up so wedgelike!"

He stood upon a barrel to give him greater height; she, rather short herself for her species, understood the practical necessity. He wore black and purple and tarnished silver bracelets whilst he preached; the pipe in his mouth puffed thick and mysterious clouds of smoke into the sky; he bore a holy symbol at first unknown to her, of a sun darkened by the blackest darkness and a jawless skull upon it...

"Cyric is lord of divine madness, of darkness!" he preached; an ignorant crowd met him with only jeers. Yet the very sound of the name sent shivers up her spine. "Cyric will rule, ye galley-whipped short-knickers, and Tiax will be his prophet!" The world's candle doused in black bound by a skull was the message; the dark beauty of it set her soul aflame. This was the censored power of the night she had secretly longed for all her days in the cruel gaolhouse of Candlekeep, this was the dark destiny for which her deep soul was shaped...

In darkened ecstasy she flung herself to her knees and prayed to Cyric.

_Little Spawn...you would serve me?_ There was, she would have sworn, a dark chuckle that filled her entire being. She knew not the reason for the epithet, but the rush of power and pleasure filled her with the delicious powers of children of the night. _You amuse me sufficiently for the time being. So mote it be._

The divine power filled her veins and she knew her destiny as a Strifeleader of Cyric; that she now wielded her mace in his name-true fortune that it was that weapon she had mastered-and that she would gain new dark powers to rend her way through this world of shallow light. She gazed upon the gnome-no, the _man_, his pointed ears declaring him like her an alien to the world of mere mundane humans-who had wrought this, taken her to the truths within the darkness of life through his passion and charisma. So many fools were depthless, yet she might spend an eternity attempting to understand the soul and mind of Tiax!

"Ye've little of a nose, acolyte Strifeleader; but Tiax declares your form fitly symmetrical to sit among the highest of the concubines of his dominion."

"I feel Cyric destined our meeting," Gormflaith replied with equal breathlessness, staring down at the bearded gnome in his black-and-purple vestments, slightly stained by tobacco. "Something about you has spoken to the darkness in my soul and shown it the way. As if in a previous incarnation our fates of twilight were intertwined."

"When Tiax rules...Tiax wishes to ask if ye would be not merely the whipper of the slaves and the faithless...but his consort as well..." The gnome, blushing below the smoke of his pipe, drew lines in the dirt with the heel of his boot; and Gormflaith chose to relieve him of his anxiety by her agreement.

He was truly gifted, clever with a rogue's talents as well as longer in the service of the divine Cyric than she; and his promise to her was nothing short of romance in its purest form. "To this end I would travel with thee, and I would do thy bidding," Tiax said. "It is the promise of the great Tiax to place my ghast and all the dark powers I have at thy disposal, accompanying thee until the world shall kneel before hi...us. Us, it shall be from this moment on!"

"Aww, I think they really do love each other," the insipid Imoen said when she opened her mouth, but such minor irritants as Imoen speaking were trivial when one was in love.

Into the Undercity the priests of Cyric set foot, united in dream and hope if a foot or so apart in height, stepping to the sweeping destiny that awaited them...


End file.
